The splicing of wires in telephone cables is an exceedingly meticulous undertaking which must be precisely accomplished. The cables come in various sizes, from those containing twenty-five wires up to those containing 2,500 wires or more. The wires are color-coded so that they can be segregated for connection purposes. No matter how large the cable, the wires are in sets or groups of twenty-five wires. Each group has a white family of wires, a red family, a black family, a yellow family, and a violet family. Within each family there is a blue wire, an orange wire, a green wire, a brown wire, and a slate wire. In the white family, each of the five colored wires has white markings. Similarly, in the red, black, yellow, and violet families, each of the five colored wires has red, black, yellow and violet markings, respectively.
There are two conventional procedures for segregating the wires of two cables to be spliced. In one instance, the operator uses an elongated rectangular piece of ribbon which he hangs near the splice, the ribbon having corresponding holes along opposite side edges thereof. In use, a blue wire, having white code markings, from one cable is extended through a hole on one edge of the paper, bent back upon itself and loosely twisted to maintain its position. A blue-white wire is then selected from the other cable and run through the corresponding hole on the opposite side edge of the ribbon and correspondingly bent back upon itself and twisted. The procedure continues until all of the wires from the two cables have been matched with the wires of the same color code being aligned transversely of the paper. A pair at a time, the wires are then disconnected from the ribbon and spliced.
The other conventional procedure is to prepare short lengths of the color-coded wires to be used as marking wires. A blue-white wire is selected from each of two cables to be spliced and a prepared marking blue-white wire is twisted about each of the cable wires at positions spaced back from the ends to hold them in paired relation with free tag ends to be spliced. The procedure is continued until all the color-coded wires have been paired by matching marking wires, frequently resulting in a virtually unmanageable entanglement. The tag ends of the cable wires are then interconnected in their segregated pairs and the marking wires removed.
These conventional procedures are tedious and slow, and that of using individual marking wires is particularly time-consuming in requiring the serviceman's time to make up the matching wires out of scrap cable and to keep them sufficiently well organized to be available when needed.
The present invention is a device made of an elongated strip of tape folded upon itself and having a multiplicity of marking wires sandwiched between the tape in substantially parallel spaced relation. The marking wires are segments of the color-coded wires, pre-cut from cables having the same colored coding. The tape is marked at the respective wires to correspond to color-coding and to relate to the cables being spliced and numbered in the sequence normally encountered in cables. In place of tape, cloth, paper, plastic or any other suitable flexible material may be utilized.